News, opinions, commentary, history and a little creative writing from a proud African-American transwoman about the world around her.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

What Are The Yogyakarta Principles?

If you peruse international blogs that cover gender identity and sexual orientation issues, from time to time you'll see a reference to the Yogyakarta Principles.

What are they, you ask? Well, peeps, school is now in session.

In response to well-documented patterns of abuse of GLBT people, from November 6-9, 2006 a distinguished group of international human rights experts met on the campus of Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia to outline a set of international principles relating to sexual orientation and gender identity.

The result of that meeting was the Yogyakarta Principles: a universal guide to human rights which affirm binding international legal standards with which all nations must comply.

The basic premise is that TBLGI people are all human beings and are equally entitled to human rights. The development of international human rights law has largely ignored them - as racial minorities were once ignored - as women were once ignored - as the disabled were once ignored.

So the people gathered in Yogyakarta logically applied established international human rights principles and made suggestions as to how these 29 principles apply to the situation of LGBTI people around the world.

While the principles acknowledge the primary obligation of various nations to implement human rights, each principle in the official PDF format is accompanied by detailed recommendations to nations and their lawmakers.

The Principles also emphasize that everyone has responsibilities to promote and protect human rights.

There are additional recommendations addressed to the UN human rights system, national human rights institutions, the media, non-governmental organizations, and other interested parties and citizens.

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The TransGriot blog's mission is to become the griot of our community. I will introduce you to and talk about your African descended transbrothers and transsisters across the Diaspora, reclaim and document our chocolate flavored trans history, speak truth to power, comment on the things that impact our trans community from an Afrocentric perspective and enlighten you about the general things that go on around me and in the communities that I am a member of.

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